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Comment by nollidge | Hacker News Reader

OK, so:

> This website uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages when they are unavailable. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site.

I'm probably being significantly thick-headed, but what exactly is Cloudflare even doing if it's not properly caching pages before traffic hits? And why would they want to advertise that fact on the error page?

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Yeah, we're a little upset it doesn't even have a cached version. Ridiculous.

http://tommy.authpad.com/don-t-copy-and-paste-other-people-s...

If you want to read it elsewhere

Just reached out via email to the site owner with some info/tips. We want to help.

CloudFlare doesn't cache HTML by default, though you can enable that with Page Rules. http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-advanced-ca...

And the origin needs to be responding long enough for us to keep a copy in cache, once the Page Rule is enabled.

Thanks, appreciate it. Are you with Cloudflare?

Yes, I work at CloudFlare.

Glad to see Page Rule helped. Some revision on cache-control headers would help further.

The website in question might not have proper Cache-Control headers, so the page may have never gone into the cache.

But the question still remains why would Cloud Flare advertise this?

Right. It's like: "CloudFlare caches things for you! Except for this thing here. But you can probably picture how great it is!"

It would appear that in this case, advertising it allowed the user to fix the problem. It's a trade-off, certainly.

It also means I've now heard of Cloud Flare.

If the site goes down before anyone even hits it, I imagine that CloudFlare can't exactly get a copy. Given that CloudFlare is a free service, I suspect that it doesn't automatically cache every page, either- it might wait until a page gets to a certain level of traffic before doing so. I have no idea, though.

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